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Accessibility

How accessible foojay.io is, which standard we hold it to, what we know is not there yet, and how to tell us when something blocks you.

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We want everything on foojay.io to be readable and usable however you browse it — with a keyboard, with a screen reader, at 200% zoom, with a colour scheme or a motion setting of your own choosing.

The standard we hold the site to

foojay.io aims to meet WCAG 2.2 level AA, the level referenced by the European standard EN 301 549 and by accessibility law in most of the countries our readers write from.

We say aims to deliberately. The site is a static site built from Markdown contributed by hundreds of authors, and the sections below say plainly where it falls short today rather than claiming a conformance we have not audited.

What is in place

  • Every page has a skip link, one <h1>, and landmarks (banner, navigation, main, complementary, contentinfo) so a screen reader can jump straight to the article.

  • The site is fully keyboard-operable: the menu, the search field, the image viewer, the event calendar, the sortable tables and the sponsor banners all work without a mouse, and the focus indicator is drawn at a contrast that is visible in both the light and the dark colour scheme.

    Try it, here or on any other page — nothing to install, just the keyboard:

    1. Press Tab once. A Skip to content button drops down at the top left; press Enter and you land past the menu, at the start of the article.
    2. Carry on pressing Tab. Everything you can use is outlined as you reach it, in the order you read it — and nothing you cannot see takes a turn. On a narrow screen, open the menu and Tab keeps you inside it until Esc closes it and hands focus back to the button you opened it with.
    3. In an article, Tab to an image and press Enter. The image viewer opens; ← and → move through the other images in that article, and Esc closes it and puts you back on the image you opened it from.
    4. On the calendar, switch to the month view, Tab to an event and press Enter for its details, then Esc to close it again.
    5. On the sitemap, Tab to a column heading of the articles table and press Enter to sort by it.

    If any of that does not do what it says here, that is a bug — please tell us.

  • Colours are measured, not guessed. Body text, muted text, links and labels on coloured fills all meet at least 4.5:1 in both schemes; the values are recorded next to each colour in the stylesheet.

  • Nothing moves on its own that you cannot stop. The sponsor banner rotation has a pause button, and it does not start at all if your system asks for reduced motion — which the site also honours for every other animation.

  • The dark colour scheme follows your system setting and can be overridden per visit.

  • Podcast episodes have a transcript on the page, so an episode is readable without listening to it — see the caveat below on where those come from.

  • No time limits, no flashing content, no audio that plays by itself.

What is not there yet

  • Images in older articles are missing alt text. foojay.io’s archive was imported from a previous system that stored most images with an empty description, and roughly 3,000 images across the archive are still in that state. New articles are checked for this when they are submitted, and the archive is being worked through. This is the site’s biggest gap.
  • Podcast transcripts are machine-generated. Every episode page carries a transcript you can read, search and skip through, but it comes from automatic speech recognition: it is tidied up, not checked against the audio, so names and technical terms are sometimes wrong. Each one says so above the text. The captions on the videos themselves are YouTube’s automatic ones, which for the same reason do not meet the standard for captions.
  • Some articles have heading levels that skip (an h2 followed by an h4), inherited from the same import.
  • Embedded content is not ours. Articles embed videos, code playgrounds and slide decks from other sites; we cannot fix the accessibility of what those services serve.

Telling us about a problem

If something on foojay.io blocks you, please tell us — a specific page and what went wrong is enough, and you do not need to know the technical name for it.

We aim to reply asap. If a fix will take longer than that, we will say so. We’ll try to do our best to make the site usable for you, but please remember that the site is built from contributions by volunteers, and we cannot promise a fix for every problem.

Writing for foojay?

If you contribute articles, the two things that matter most are a description for every image and link text that says where the link goes. Both are covered in the article template, the file you copy to start a new post.

Found a mistake, or something to add? Edit this page on GitHub